Practitioner Learning From Frontline Contexts
To begin with, it was never my intention to re engage with counseling or therapeutic practices learned in my earlier years. After 6 years working in Counter Child Trafficking, I felt an urge to relocate from the UK to Athens in Greece, which was a destination and transit place for forced prostitution.
On arriving 5 years ago, we found ourselves in the middle of the Greek economic crisis struggling to administrate the needs of its own people alongside the refugee crisis. Mass arrivals were in full flow with the nearest Greek island to Turkey being Lesvos. This was now overflowing into Athens as the next stop, filling its city squares and parks fast becoming full of refugee families escaping war and injustice, but now exposed to the elements. Crisis centred resources were slowly implemented on the islands, which would mostly come from western volunteers, but things were slow to transition and engage with the needs of those now lost in limbo on the mainland, at the mercy of a Greek state strategy of almost total hostility. Eventually, a response would be made by many hundreds of volunteers and grass roots groups emerging to help and remaining long after the large NGOs would withdraw, a true baptism by experiential immersion.
It was here that I felt a need to make a shift from working in anti human trafficking to the thousands of people hustled into camps, squats or left to fend for themselves on the streets, several thousand unaccompanied children amongst them, all vulnerable and at risk of exploitation. It is a traffickers dream to have people arrive at their feet with no need to move them across borders themselves. Trafficking in people was never a static thing, it was an evolving business and in a context such as this a new term entered the anti-traffickers vocabulary, ‘exploited on arrival’.
Those working to come alongside those impacted by the crisis, were often people with no previous experience and yet there were some who were battle weary from previous contexts of failed state responses to people fleeing war such as the Calais Jungle in Northern France. It would be here amongst these workers that I would learn the term ‘secondary trauma’, the way in which a worker begins to acquire their own trauma experience after being exposed to the suffering and stories of others and yet, there seemed little to no opportunities for therapeutic support.
The Cyclical Nature of 8
The Healing 8 is a name I have given to a therapeutic observational tool, which was given to me while walking with an Aussie thinker called James Thwaites along a beach in Manly, a suburb of Sydney. He had developed several conceptual tools in his own therapy practice and for some reason the simplicity of this idea is the one which stuck with me and has become profoundly helpful in understanding the internal and external conflicts of those I now work with.
Having plugged into a multi faceted refugee project I decided to place myself in the kitchen which seemed to have the largest amount of volunteers flowing in and out of the space as we cooked food for around 1000 people each day with some young entrepreneurs realising the value of re tasking swimming goggles during the mass onion chopping sessions. Unusually, it was not the needs of the refugees which most caught my eye, it was the condition of the workers who seemed to frequently be near to or beyond burn out. The worst part being, that the majority did not know what they were experiencing or why.
I decided to make a poster and laminate it, a picture of a coffee mug where the handle was an ‘ear’ with the words Gaz Chat Space – contact here for anyone struggling with stress, burn out, relationship problems, or need to vent. The poster moved around various walls over the coming months and still I had not one single contact from the workforce and then in the course of one week, this happened.
I saw one of the long term volunteers who had helped establish this significant project, she was walking around with ‘leaking face’ that thing that happens when your face looks perfectly normal and yet your emotional bucket of unresolved issues refused to obey all your best commands to conform and your eyes begin to leak without your permission. In taking her to one side I asked how she was doing and ‘pop’, there it was, “I’m leaving tomorrow, flying out, and I haven’t told anyone yet. I just need to go, now!”
It wasn’t that I had misread the needs of those constantly exposed to the suffering of others, it was that nothing had been done ‘proactively’ to educate them in regard to self care, signs of burn out, exposure to other peoples trauma etc. All they knew was they were in melt down, coming to the end of a very long piece of rope regarding old coping mechanisms failing one after the other and simply being ‘in feeling’ or as such wonderfully salty souls tend to say; “I’m f$cked”.
Another foundational encounter was when I met a project founder asking me to come in and do some training on ‘vulnerabilities to exploitation’ in their support work with child Afghan and Syrian males. However we never got that far, since in asking how she was, and using my fingers on the side of the coffee cup to illustrate our emotional capacity being full, she said, moving my finger an inch down from the top of the cup “ I’m here at the moment, because I’ve just taken a week off” and with her moving my finger back to full, “and I will be here again by the end of the week”.
Following these encounters I simply began to make myself available for therapeutic support and to be more pragmatic in helping people recover, since supportive chats were not going to be enough. Slowly but surely a trickle of people began to ask for my help and as expected some very clear patterns emerged.
